Danish ISP Must Continue to Block The Pirate Bay

In February 2008, a Danish court ordered the ISP Tele2 to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The controversial ruling was under appeal but today, in a move which will delight the IFPI, the High Court upheld the decision to force the ISP to stop its customers from accessing the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.

The original court case to force Danish ISP Tele2 to block The Pirate Bay was initiated by the IFPI, the anti-piracy organization representing the worldwide recording industry. IFPI argued that Tele2 was assisting in mass copyright infringement, and that access to the site therefore had to be blocked.

At the time, The Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep told TorrentFreak: ‘I hope the torrent community understands what this will do to Danish people. It will also act as a very bad precedent for the European Union, and I hope everybody will fight this.’

In February, a Danish court sided with IFPI and ruled that Tele2 had assisted in copyright infringement because they give their customers access to The Pirate Bay, thereby copying copyrighted material in their routers.

The decision heated the debate on ISPs filtering the Internet, not least because it goes against European law, which states that ISPs are not responsible for the traffic their users generate. Nonetheless, IFPI booked an initial success in forcing Tele2 to block the site on a DNS level.

However, at this stage, all was not lost. Traffic to the site only increased as a result of the publicity generated by the block, and the decision was subject to a Tele2 appeal. The Pirate Bay also promised that if Tele2 subsequently won, they would claim compensation and use the money to fund aspiring Danish artists who make music and release it for free.

The result of the appeal was announced just a short time ago, and it is not good news for the Swedish tracker, Tele2, and potentially other ISPs who desperately do not want to become unpaid ‘Internet policemen’. The High Court upheld the decision to force Tele2 to continue the DNS level block on The Pirate Bay, so that its customers cannot access the site.

This isn’t the first time a Danish ISP has been ordered to censor the Internet. In December 2006 a court ruled against Tele2 in a similar case, ordering the ISP to block access to Allofmp3.com. According to the ruling, Tele2 was willingly infringing copyright if their customers use AllofMP3 to download music.

At the time of the initial decision in February, the IFPI threatened that if it was successful and Tele2 lost its appeal, it would take further steps to force other ISPs to start blocking The Pirate Bay too. Jesper Bay, the head of the Danish IFPI told Computer World today that he expects other ISPs to follow suit, and block access to The Pirate Bay as well.

Whether or not Tele2 will appeal the decision at the Supreme Court is not known yet. More on this pivotal breaking news as we get it.